The Serbian Civil War

From today's Wall Street Journal Europe

Updated May 14, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

Serbia's parliamentary election, the first since the "loss" of Kosovo earlier this year, was supposed to signal the country's future direction. It didn't. The pro-Western camp did better than expected but virulent Serbian nationalism proved resilient; both sides will now compete to cobble together a ruling coalition.

The fevered parsing of Sunday's results, however, misses the real story: Serbia's messy politics are really its own business. In a nice change from the previous decade, the country poses little...